HI203

European World 1500-1750

Communities

Stephen Batess.m.j.bates@warwick.ac.uk

Aims of today

• Consider the way early modern society was structured• Examine the importance of status

• Identify bonds and tensions affecting social relations

A differentiated and evolving society

built on inequality and collective identities

Social Structure

• clergy

• nobility

• commoners

A society of‘estates’ 

The third estate carrying the clergy and nobility on

its back (French print, 1790)

Abbey of Weingarten(18thC)

Pope Julius II (d. 1513)Portrait by Raphael

Heinrich Bullinger,Reformer of Zurich

(d. 1557)Clergy

NoblesRanks and challenges

Vittore Carpaccio,‘Francesco della Rovere’ (1510)

Nobles & GentryAdaptation

V. Aravitsky,‘Grand Duke Paul Petrovitch’ in his army uniform(1778) Sir William Ross,

Scottish gentleman and architect (d. 1710)

Commoners: Peasants

Albrecht Dürer, ‘Peasants’ (c. 1512)

Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait of the Merchant Georg Gisze (1532)

Commoners:Burghers

Poor and marginal people

A hospital / almshouse / prison near Paris (1780) Late medieval leper with bell

Status

Components

Display

Wealth

‘Merchant banker’ Jacob Fugger (the Rich) in the Augsburg headquarters of his trading empire (c. 1518)

Marriage partners

Dowries and

dynastic interests

Jan van Eyck, ‘The Arnolfini wedding’

(1434)

Officeholding

Members of the council leaving Augsburg’s town hall

Jörg Breu, ‘December’, (Augsburg, c. 1525)

None shall wear any cloth of gold, tissue, nor fur of sables: except duchesses, marquises, and countesses in their gowns; [none] silver, tinseled satin, silk, or cloth mixed or embroidered with gold or silver or pearl …: except all degrees above viscountesses, and viscountesses, baronesses, and other personages of like degrees in their kirtles and sleeves.

[None shall wear] velvet (crimson, carnation); … embroidery or … lace of gold or silver: except all degrees above mentioned, the wives of knights of the Garter and of the Privy Council, the ladies and gentlewomen of the privy chamber and bedchamber, and maids of honour.

[None shall wear] satin, damask, or … fur whereof the kind groweth not within the Queen's dominions …: except the degrees and persons above mentioned, or the wives of those that may dispend £100 by the year and so valued in the subsidy book. No persons under the degrees above specified shall wear any guard or welt of silk upon any petticoat, cloak, or safeguard.

‘Statute of Apparel’ issued by Elizabeth I in 1574 (http://www.elizabethan-era.org.uk)

Commemoration

Tanfield monument ,

Burford parish church

(c. 1628)

Tomb of the

Earl of Leicester,

St Mary, Warwick

(late 16thC)

Seating planfor Whitton Church(Lincs., 18thC)

Pews and pew disputes

In a Star Chamber lawsuit, Giles Dobellof Minhead (Somerset) complained thatRobert Heyward and others ‘with forceof arms, that is to say with swords and daggers and other weapons … took out Margaret, [my] wife, out of her pew whereshe was kneeling in the church and brought[her] out into an aisle … against her willand then and there did beat and ill use her.’

Cited in K. French, The Good Women of the Parish

(Philadelphia, 2008), 115.

Relations

Bonds

Tensions

Feudal and patronage links

Knighting ceremony

conducted by French

King Jean II

(15thC miniature)

Sociability Barthel Beham, ‘Village Fair’ (woodcut, 1534)

‘The Law of Drinking’ (woodcut, 17thC)

‘My Dog and I’ – Reconstruction of an

early modern alehouseballad performed by the

Dufay Collective

‘When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman ? From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men. For if God would have had any bondmen from the beginning, he would have appointed who should be bond, and who free. And therefore I exhort you to consider that now the time is come, appointed to us by God, in which ye may (if ye will) cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty.’

John Ball’s sermon to the rebels in the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381

ResistanceCover page of theTwelve Articles (1525)

Third, until now it has been the custom for us to be regarded as a lord's personal property, which is deplorable since Christ redeemed us all with the shedding of his precious blood.…….

Eighth, we are aggrieved, especially those that have their own land, because these lands cannot sustain the payments on them, and because these peasants must then forfeit the land and are ruined.

The Awakening of the Third Estate French Revolution printOutlook

CONCLUSIONS

• Early modern society consisted of (increasingly differentiated) ‘estates’ based on lineage, collective rights and legal privileges

• Relative decline of clergy and rise of middling sort/gentry

• Status was displayed, acknowledged and negotiated in various forms of social exchange

• Strong bonds and mutual dependencies coexisted with (periodically erupting) tensions